"Twitter Users Are Smug"

The raucous two women that form the musical-comedy duo of Garfunkel and Oates have a snarkily culturally-incorrect song about the assumed superiority complex of pregnant women, "Pregnant Women Are Smug." I've been toying with revising the lyrics for power Twitter users, to reflect the sense of closed-circle smugness I've been sensing from power-tweeters of late.

Even though I'm a heavy Facebook user, I'm not trying to launch a new Microsoft/Apple-style culture war. Users of Facebook and LinkedIn rarely lead any passionate defense of their social networks. (Users of MySpace, meanwhile, remain on life support, heading to flatline, as the network laid off half its employees in mid-January.) After all, Facebook is the network with the CEO everyone loves to hate. Few get as worked up over Twitter founders Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone as they do about the junior svengali of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg.

Nor do I have a serious problem with Twitter's notorious 140-character limit for posts, even if the striving for brevity usually leads to superficial thinking. This is the result of any social network designed first and foremost for a handheld smartphone (or even dumb phone) client. No, my main gripe is the benignly authoritarian network architecture of Twitter, and the way its single-direction, one-t0-many multipoint topology is ideally designed for celebrities and PR managers.

Asking followers to engage in layers of re-tweets while urging them to "join the discussion" would not be so annoying if passionate Twitter advocates were up front about the network's limitations. When I call Twitter authoritarian, we should look at the root of that word: authority. Twitter's hub-and-spoke is designed for followers to pay attention to the central authority figures gracing each sub-hub, and to mouth what the grand poobahs of Twitter have to say. Sure, Facebook has plenty of re-postings, people with 1000 friends, and recycled information, but it is designed with a more peer-to-peer infrastructure. If social networks were high schools, Facebook would be the unique environment in which jocks, freaks, goths, and nerds were all on equal planes, while Twitter would be one with a built-in reinforcement of cliques.

Stone and Dorsey are not responsible for the aura or arrogance that populates the network lately, nor are the early Twitter users who have become power-tweeters by default. Rather, we see a new breed of market analyst and journalist promoting others to join a discussion that rarely is as rich as one on Facebook or LinkedIn - and not because of the short tweets. When people complain of Twitter being a confusing cacophony of tweet, they could just as easily gripe about Facebook being a noisy party of pretty pictures and videos, signifying nothing. But many of the Twitter complainers seem to subconsciously understand that they are being fed one-way communications, as evidenced by Twitter's language of followers and followed. Commentators like Grayson Davis were recognizing this funny celebrity-driven atmosphere two years ago, but their critiques were misinterpreted as being directed to Twitter's superficiality. Let me re-state this clearly, I'm bothered by Twitter's fascist network architecture.

Mind you, I don't object when press colleagues at EE Times, EDN, and other engineering sites chide heads-down engineers to use more social networks, with an emphasis on Twitter. God knows such vertical network users could use any improvement in social skills, as could many scientific and academic sub-communities. No, what I find offensive are the media mavens on Twitter who have spoken out in recent weeks against tactics such as cross-posting, assuming that a savvy media user will be Twitter-centric by design. No, not unless one wants to emphasize PR or celebrity life. I'm not going to stop tweeting on occasion, but I will spend the bulk of my time on more egalitarian network architectures. And power-tweeters should understand that they are driving potential Twitter users away by assuming an air of superiority for a network that has some profound issues on how it defines a discussion.

A New Quiescent Bardo State After a Synaptic Storm

Given the strange conscious states of the fall, amidst PHN attacks and pixelslips and whatnot, it was an odd experience to attend the Defrag conference in Denver in mid-November, dedicated to trying to find larger meaning and structure in the emergent social networks that have taken over most static web sites. I have identified two problem areas in posts on the Smartbook blog, here and here. I'll summarize those areas below, but first a word about the tie between true believers and marketing: Defrag and its cousin Glue are often given kudos for avoiding the marketing hype of conferences like Web 2.0. Nevertheless, Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems warned us long ago, regarding nanotechnology, that even sober engineers and programmers can be drinkers-of-Kool-Aid if they speak of technological promises without probing negative social consequences. Defrag 2009 had a bit of that back-slapping feel. Twitter and real-time streams and Facebook and live-update aggregation were given a heavier dissection than in other venues, true, but there was a little too much self-congratulatory examination of the synaptic web without enough deep critique. Still, here's what I found interesting in what real-time web pundits had to say:

First, the notion of searching static web sites is becoming as archaic as an encyclopedia on a CD-ROM. Information arises in an emergent fashion through the sharing and discovery of information real-time across social media sites. This means that the interface of choice moves away from a Word or Excel document, or even an email inbox, and toward a real-time status update feed. What we see at the top of a Facebook page of Tweetdeck may be the interface of choice for many information sites in the future. How does any data-management system keep up with this torrential real-time feed and filter out relevant information without missing key nuggets? Good question.

In the second part of my Smartbook posts, I addressed a tougher topic that arose with Khris Loux's presentation on the synaptic web. If we really want to consider client nodes (human individuals, usually) in social networks to be the equivalent of a synapse, then all those rules about neural-network behavior - learning through back-propagation, finding a higher state of consciousness through simulated annealing, etc. - apply. There is also the issue of allowing the uber-brain of a global network to establish long-term memory through the different oscillatory pattern of a sleep cycle. Where does that exist in the constant chattery updates of Twitter or Facebook? The notion of an institutional memory gets shallower and shallower. Keynote speaker Stowe Boyd pointed out that Twitter "memory" now has decreased from two weeks to two days, and may be shrunk to minutes if Twitter's growth trend continues. A conscious, sentient entity without a working memory is reduced to sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Some people in the journalism community fret about how the replacement of real newsgathering by quick tweets will significantly harm people's understanding of the world around them. Others who study consciousness itself are concerned that social networks, particularly rapid-update systems like Twitter, will encourage superficiality more than the rapid channel-changing that was the source of so much hand-wringing in the 1980s. But that merely mentions two manifestations of a larger issue: The synaptic web that is emerging based on shared communities using real-time feeds, is a creature living in the present and lumbering forward of its own accord. On a certain level, we have lopped off large sections of the cortex and cerebellum in this global brain, and have reduced the global consciousness to its limbic level. The synaptic web needs to re-evolve a higher brain function, which can accommodate memory and analysis even as real-time streams grow exponentially. Short of a global crisis of some sort, we are not going to be stopping those constant tweetstorms and live-update feeds. We need to find a way to recapture remembering, to design an institutional memory, even in the midst of a synaptic storm.

Twitters and Echelon and Iran and Planetary Management, Oh My!

Yes, I've avoided commenting on the Iranian elections for a week now, even after the State Department credited the always-annoying Twitter with enabling street protests. And I've ducked a lot of comments on the National Security Agency's growing problems with Congress until the NSA made the front page in The New York Times today. Then, with members of Congress expressing faux-shock at NSA, even as Jeff Pulver's 140 Character conference told us this week that Twitter will make us smart and strong and free forever, I simply melted down. AUUUGGGGHHH! Here, some related observations on all topics.

First, Iran: Obama is right that Moussavi's record as PM during the Iran-Iraq War doesn't raise a lot of hope that he'd be that much of an improvement over the lewd and rude Ahmadinejad. But the shout-mouth tendencies of the latter is precisely why he probably won the election fair and square, albeit not with the percentages claimed. One dependable tendency that applies globally is that people like dumb loud-mouthed populists more than they like democratic reformers. When the populist claims that the world is picking on Nation X, the people of Nation X will roar their approval. Funny how Kim Jong Il isn't trying this in North Korea, though his people are too cowed and starving to respond to the "us against the world" rhetoric.

I love seeing young Iranian demonstrators sacrifice all for the sake of a pseudo-reform. And it is indeed great to see them use tools like Twitter to bypass state censorship. But they can often forget that rural, unconnected and highly traditionalist people in Iran (and in Thailand and in Venezuela and even in the good ol' US of A) are often the ones that determine elections, and they like to hear strong messages from their jingoist daddy. And unfortunately, they often cheer when some group like the Basij starts cracking the heads of the demonstrators. The plain fact of the matter is that Iran will never have democracy until the Council of Guardians, the Basij, and the Revolutionary Guards are destroyed, and the clerics are hanging from lampposts. I don't see that happening very soon.

Now, to the role of Twitter with democratic forces in Iran and Gaza, and with repressionist forces within the Israeli Defense Forces and the US Defense Department: Yes, Twitter can be a tool of liberation. But, as always, the Twitter network is now dominated by messages from corporate PR headquarters, Wall Street monetizers, and the power brokers who control the large armies of the world. Just as the al-Qaeda terrorists realized quickly that they had to stop using satellite phones, those who say they are in opposition to the planetary powers will quickly learn that they cannot tweet without providing information to those that would keep them down. Meanwhile, Jeff Pulver tells attendees at the 140 Characters conference that Twitter is a tool for transforming our lives. Puh-leeze. Twitter is a temporarily-interesting social network that will be replaced by another social network soon. And its underlying technology, like that of SMS or simple e-mail, can be monitored by the good old National Security Agency.

Which brings us to the front-page NYT article on NSA. Its one relevant point is saying that few in Congress are intelligent enough to understand NSA's underlying technology. Hell, few in Congress are intelligent enough to write a freaking bill on any topic. The NSA relies on a worldwide monitoring network called Echelon, that is managed by the five members of the UKUSA Treaty, who truly are a "white boys' club": US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand. No NATO, no anyone else. Echelon operates largely from space on a 24/7 basis, and its default state is "on." Satellites do not recognize national boundaries. The NSA is always intercepting analog voice traffic and digital TCP/IP traffic (including email, Twitter, packet voice, etc.) on a global basis, and has to figure out ways to filter out the US citizen traffic. And it claims to "mistakenly" collect this traffic? Really? Seriously? Please don't insult our intelligence.

If there is any advantage to decentralized, short-message systems like Twitter, it's that widespread use will flood the NSA's capabilities, making it harder to implement planetary management. Unfortunately, the NSA will use that as an excuse to build gargantuan new storage facilities like "Storage Station Freedom" near Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. And Congress will be dumb enough to give NSA the funding. And US agencies will cheer the brave decentralized use of Twitter even as NSA scrambles to intercept the messages. And pundits will cheer the use of Twitter even as it is twisted around for nefarious purposes, while encouraging more ADHD-style thinking in the populace. And we will watch faux battles for democracy played out between populists and faux reformists. And little will change. And since Echelon has been around for nearly 60 years now, we can truly say we've seen this movie before. And we will see it again and again and again. And sorry, Jeff, we will not be transformed by Twitter or anything else, though we will certainly be monitored.

You Can't Tweet Science

One little piece of information I missed during my weeks without obsessive news content was the late-April gossip about a shakeup at the venerable Scientific American, in which both editor in chief John Rennie (above) and publisher Steven Yee left the magazine. While Rennie denies it, rumor is rampant that the board wants to take the magazine further into the Discover domain of consumer-aimed, Twitter-feed-led pop science. Shudder.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that Rennie didn't walk on water, though he wrote damned fine editorials and tried to hold the line against the superficiality tide sweeping science publications. SA had gone a bit crazy in brand-extension, launching bimonthly publications on the mind, and on special topics, that almost made the wider Scientific American brand as difficult to pace as The Economist. Hell, it was during the Rennie/Yee tenure that SA broadened into science cruises at sea, f'cryin' out loud ("not that there's anything wrong with that").

But I can see the 140-character handwriting on the Twitter wall now for insta-science feeds from our friends at SA. Ugh. Thankfully, Lost creator J.J. Abrams has spoken out in an essay in Wired against instant-gratification culture, and my dear friend and fellow blogger Ruth Mowry has reminded us that Twitter feeds of The New York Times were never a good idea. Scientific American, are you listening? Science can be fun and stimulating, to be sure, but it must also be serious, lengthy, and loaded with content.

Twitter, I Rebuke Thee!

You knew it was true, and here's the proof from Gaebler: a new Harvard study shows that Twitter use was the main 2008 factor for both the financial meltdown and the business slowdown. And here all these populist know-nothings are wasting their torches on AIG and subprime tranchers. Feh. If you tweet, you are the destructive source of our global downfall, not to mention spawn of Satan. Stop Twitter and Save America!